The necessity for CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and one-to-one marketing has recently received a great deal of attention due to factors such as shortening of the product life as varieties of products are produced, and customer's orientation to customized services as the use of the Internet spreads. These methods try to raise the customer satisfaction, win new customers, and keep customers.
One-to-one marketing is a kind of database marketing which creates a database of individual attribute information including the age, gender, hobby, preference, and purchase log of a customer, analyzes the contents of the database, and makes a proposal complying with customer's needs. A typical method of this marketing is variable printing. These days, a variable printing system which customizes a document for each customer and outputs the document has been developed along with the development of the DTP (Desk Top Publishing) technique and the pervasion of digital printing apparatuses. The variable printing system needs to create a customized document in which contents of a different amount for each customer are optimally laid out.
Generally, when such a customized document is to be created by the variable printing system, containers are laid out in a document. The container is a drawing area for drawing contents (drawing contents (e.g., an image and text)), and is also called a field area.
A desired customized document (called a template) can be created by performing work of laying out containers in a document and associating a database with the layout (associating various contents in the database with the containers). The contents of the customized document can be changed (made variable) by properly switching contents in the containers in the customized document (changing the association). Such a document is called a variable data document, and a printing system using the variable data document is a variable printing system.
In a conventional variable printing system, the size of a container associated with a text or image serving as contents is fixed. When contents in the database are inserted (flowed) into a container and the data amount is larger than the container size, the following problems arise. That is, if the data is a text, overlapping of the text in the container occurs. If the data is an image, clipping of the image by the container occurs. When the data amount is smaller than the container size, no proper display may be obtained such that a gap appears between the container and its internal contents.
In order to solve these problems, there is proposed an automatic layout system which changes the container size in accordance with the information amount. The automatic layout system can flexibly set the container sizes of a text and image. Some automatic layout systems can provide a flexible container size and change a container to a large size in accordance with the data amount to be inserted. There is also proposed a technique of, when data of a text which cannot fall within a fixed container size is inserted, adjusting (reducing) the font size of the text and displaying all the text within a container.
When, however, the size of a container is increased, the container overlaps another container in a document. In adjusting the font size of a text, the font size becomes excessively small when the amount of text to be processed is large. In order to solve these problems, as another technique of changing the layout, a technique of downsizing a container adjacent to a target container when the target container increases in size is disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-129658 (paragraph 0049, FIG. 8) “Layout Designing Apparatus”.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2001-092820 proposes a technique of manually adjusting a layout result which is greatly different from an original in format and size as a result of an automatic layout process based on the original, editing an inserted character string one by one, comparing the editing result with the original, and when no difference between them is detected, completing editing.
The layout designing apparatus disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-129658 manages the priorities of layout materials, lays out materials in the order of priorities, and decides the layout. That is, the layout designing apparatus only decides the order of laying out target materials each serving as a layout unit. In this case, an area for a layout material of the lowest priority always becomes narrow, and a layout desired by the user cannot be obtained.
The apparatus in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-129658 is limited to a so-called DTP technique of editing inserted content data itself to adjust the whole layout, and laying out fixed content data.
In the variable printing system as a purpose of the present invention, editing of content data inserted into a container means editing of content data stored in a database, which makes variable printing insignificant.
Hence, the layout need be adjusted not by adjusting content data itself, but by optimally adjusting the size of a container for inserting content data on the basis of the inserted content data. There is also a need to more efficiently perform operation for this adjustment.
In this technical field, a mechanism has been devised which dynamically lays out each record by making containers push each other on the basis of the size of data inserted (flowed) into each container laid out in a page. By adopting this mechanism, the layout can be changed for each record, and a printed material which minimizes a gap and overflow can be obtained.
However, with the mechanism of dynamically laying out each record, the operator cannot recognize the layout before a printed material is output. The layout can be previewed before printing, but it is not practical to preview all pages because the database may hold thousands of records in variable printing.
For this reason, demands arise for creating the design of a template while allowing the operator to recognize the layout to a certain degree when a dynamic layout is applied.